Don’t worry though. I know I look a little intimidating to everyday people, but I promise there’s a reason for the way I look. I’m not gonna talk your ear off, either. I know most people hate having people next to them on the bus, but I’m usually able to change their minds.

The rest of her pregnancy was without complication. The town marvelled; many had been sure she would die. But she had picked up a strange habit. It was remarked on in town how she would leave her home in the evenings, and walk along water’s edge in the marsh, even until long after dark.

See, what you oughta do is get yourself an older vehicle. Take the Chimera for example. That engine has been running smooth and clean for over 60 years. With a few replacement parts, of course. They just don’t make cars like this anymore.

Say, could you hand me that flathead over there? The missing leg makes walking to the tool bench a real pain.

Open your eyes. Don’t fall asleep, you mustn’t fall asleep. You have to stay awake, or the crows will eat you. Some think that they go for the eyes first, but it’s always the tongue. They take your tongue so you cannot cry for help, then leave you to bleed. The eyes they save for last.

You've been so good this year that we decided to leave you an extra little something in your stocking. Just make sure to give it a few good whacks before reaching in, to make absolute sure that it's dead.

Later, I found out it was the coldest that day had been in a hundred years. I’m convinced I nearly died on the road that afternoon. And there’d be times that night when I wasn’t sure I hadn’t, and that the cabin I’d arrived at wasn’t hell.

The letters swam, spilling into different words, which I read as they appeared.

“The crowning achievement of the Greatest and Best was Universal Discovery. Our voyagers found the outermost edge of the universe. Do you understand? The absolute end of everything. We found the answers we were looking for, and the answers you are looking for. We built this monument afterwards. Come and see.”

Performed by Amaka Umeh, and featuring Chris Vergara and Anthony Botelho.

I never thought a hospital could be so pleasant. It began to feel like a home and besides the healing, visits from friends, and watching some of the trashiest daytime TV you can imagine, it was a pretty uneventful winter for me.

Not long after Thomas’ return, I started noticing strange things in and around the house. Noises at first, at night. Something like the sound of distant thunder. Boom… boom… boom… off in the distance, in the middle of the night. Oddly, at around the same time Thomas would leave bed.

The chill wind blows and carries the smell of pumpkin rot. Creatures and bones and things peer from every home. The doorbell rings in the dead of night on a dark street. Do you dare answer? It must be time for more snips, and it must be time for Halloween.

Now, that all sounds a bit dispassionate and business-minded when I listen to myself. This isn’t supposed to be a sales pitch. No… please don’t mistake me as being blase, this work really is my passion. As are the pigs.

The sun was right overhead. It was so hot I thought the plastic wheels of my travel bag would melt to the pavement. As I turned from the parking lot down the side of the highway, the fresh dose of codeine washed over me, like white surf on a sunlit beach. The pills made everything even brighter and hazier. I felt like I was floating on the thick humid air, floating down the road like a raft down a warm stream.

"It’s dangerous to face them alone. You must have others with you, others you trust, even if it puts them in danger." That's what Laudens told me when I first became the Catcher. It was the soundest of advice. And yet, sometimes we do not have the luxury of following sound advice.

She would stand in purple darkness, back pressed against one of the marble pillars supporting the window’s arch, and strain her ears to catch scraps of conversation as they drifted up through the purple leaves and white flowers of the citrus trees. In Constantinople, somebody was always listening.

And then, some strange, lingering sense of wrongness resolved itself into a realization. The people at this party were strange. They were all slightly too long and slender in the limbs and body. They all moved the same way, with the same liquid nonchalance.

But on one night – it was late in the fall, I think – a foreign sound leaked into my father’s left ear, the one with the hearing aid. He took out the device and shook it, a habit that seemed to help, like the way you might hit an old radio to get it back to its senses. But when he put it back in, the sound didn’t disappear; if anything, it became a little clearer.

She looked down at her drink, and tilted it to watch the fluid stick to the sides of the glass. She wrinkled her nose. He’d said it was “Bessenjenniver,” a specialty, and the bartender had poured her a thick shot in a yellowed tumbler, after unscrewing the cap and tearing open a crust of old sugar. For this, he had charged the absurd sum of 35 cents.

Tell me, what draws you to that place? Were you raised here as child, wandering to the cliffs in your youth to throw rocks at the crumbling caves past the inlet? Did your elders tell you never to go near it, and you’ve just never shaken the childish want to disobey? Or have you passed by it in the middle of the night, and seen a dim pale light shining through the water and shining through the cracks in the rock face?

I was mesmerized by the building, looking up and up at its titanic height. Near this end, it had a tower which soared to a height nearly double that of the bell tower at St. Mark’s. At the peak of the spire was a golden weather vane. Unlike St. Mark’s, the figure on that weather vane was not an angel.

You know, I’ve seen the video. There was a good six months where she watched it almost every day, desperately searching for a clue, any kind of hint. All for nothing, obviously. I think we all knew that, the neighbours. But we’d sit with her while she did it, so she wouldn’t have to be alone.

Performed by Sarah Marchand, and featuring Kevin Matthew Wong and Frances Loiselle.

My old man turned to me, and he said, Jimmy, it’s a bad stretch of road along here. If you can avoid it, never drive it after dark. It’s a bad stretch, and bad strange things happen to folks along here after dark.